City parks are wasteful and useless - says people who have never lived within walking distance of a good park and drive everywhere
They are great places for dogging.
I figured you meant walking your dog but then i saw your name
Always strange how enthusiastic friends from the americas are about dogging, cottaging, and double-fisting.
That’s what she said.
They arent wasteful or useless, but they do tend to suck due to the sheer numbers of people who use them.
I believe, the solution to that is more parks.
Yeah look at my city on a map, Victoria BC. Like half the city is green space and I can easily find solitude.
Supplementary solution: abolish billboards and oversized/tall signposts.
Hawaii did this, and it looks amazing. Other states have banned billboards too.
This actually does seem to work. Vancouver has a LOT of parks, and I don’t find them crowded or underutilized. It’s a nice balance where there are people to talk to but you can find your own quiet spot too
https://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/parks-gardens-and-beaches.aspx
Apparently we have 250 parks, making up 11% of Vancouver’s land mass
Plus they’re not wild at all. It’s still a lot of pavement-touching. Especially when there’s signs telling you not to walk on the grass.
America really sucks. Go look at my home city of Edinburgh on a map, that’s how you do a city
Princes Gardens going from a dump in the 1800s to a nice park is quite a transformation
It’s a really beautiful park with an incredible background of old town royal mile and it isn’t even crack top 3 best parks in Edinburgh
That’s not a park, then, it’s a nature preserve.
I agree those are much better than parks
So… you don’t want to touch the grass?
I want to touch dirt. I want mud squishing between my toes and the cool wind whipping over my naked body. I want to feast on wild edibles while I gaze at a sky so full of stars it hurts to look at them. I want my neighbors to have paws and fur and feathers and scales. I want any signs I see to be curiosities or raw materials and to divorce myself from the human concept of time. I want to not see another person for months, and even then they are on a distant hilltop and quickly flee.
So… a national park, then?
Said no one ever? Where in the world have you heard that?!
I’ve lived in small rural towns, where parks are a waste of taxpayer dollars according to many people
I’d imagine those same people think any spending is a waste of taxpayers dollars.
Well, yeah.
Bizarre. I stop at a few rural parks when bringing the kids home to Florida. They’re mostly very nice and well attended.
OTOH, I can see rural people not valuing parks. After all, we can go 1/4 mile from anywhere and be in actual nature.
Oh yeah the parks are usually fine (albeit, some can be quite bland) - it’s the people who don’t appreciate them. Why go to the park when they could go to the mall? Because by the time they’re in their car, why drive to a park?
git the gubberment outta my paycheck, thats socialism
hail king trump long like the king
hey where’s my social security check?
Yeah the concrete jungle can really put your mind in neutral gear the longer you move through it. Used to ride my bike all around downtown ft worth tx back in the early 70s. Then got transplanted out to the wide open ranch lands and found some quieter places to ride
Grinder 😏
that square foot of grass isn’t for the cats it’s for me
Only if I can make “cute” faces at you and go pspspspspspsps
I have a Pavlovian response to that where I blink slowly and tchktchktchk back
Get out there and consume!
Everything is nature.
Yeah, you can take in beauty anywhere, even a plastic bag floating in the wind. It’s more a mind set. If you deliberately look for goodness and beauty, you’ll find it. I could stroll down 5th avenue NYC and look up and be in awe of the towering monuments to human ingenuity and grit all around me. Or I can take that same walk and fixate in on litter and grumble.
Yeah, you stand in awe of the human ingenuity behind a strip mall, Taylor. Really take it all in.
Look at that line cook smoking a cig in the twighlight of the panda express sign. He’s squatted on the milk crate like a shitting monkey.
Beautiful.
Yeah, you can take in beauty anywhere, even a plastic bag floating in the wind.
Don’t forget getting stabbed by elmo!
City people. They want everyone to be packed into a 5sq mile radius, have busses take them everywhere, but also be able to walk outside and see green trees and wide open fields.
Ever heard of green space?
Literally city people really just want to see some trees on the sidewalk, some flowerbeds, and have a few little parks here and there with only a couple big community parks to be able to have picnic or whatever.
Look up Verdun, Quebec(Montréal). There is absolutely massive park running along the Saint Laurence River for many kilometers and it’s fuckin’ awesome without getting in the way of the lovely, mid-density, walkable neighbourhood right beside it. It’s fuckin’ sick. That and Parc Angrignon, too!
Anyway the point is that you could not be more wrong.
Dedicated walkable greenspace is not impossible nor is it a sin to want. New York City, New York, Boston, Massachusetts and Savannah, Georgia (all USA) have plenty of parks and are walkable with public transportation fairly readily available, and those are just three examples.
I mean, when you’re not being hyperbolic it’s absolutely possible. You can easily have a walkable/transit oriented city with lots of green space
Edit: it also doesn’t even need to be that dense. Like most of my city’s downtown is a lot of old houses rather than endless big apartment towers. The difference between my neighbourhood and American style suburbs is that I have multiple nice high streets within a ten minute walk and can get by without a car, while still living in a three bedroom house
Just look at any college campus and try to imagine if those tried to function without walking and transit. If anything, cities without walkable spaces aren’t practical. And things like places to sit and tree coverage are essential parts of walkability, especially further south.
Exactly. It’s crazy and sad that some people are so used to car centric suburbs that they can’t even picture anything else
Alternatively, they live in or near poorly designed urban areas. There are definitely some in my local urban city center.
You do realize the pic is of the suburbs, right? An actually-dense urban area doesn’t have tons of signs that are huge because they’re designed to be read from inside of a moving car, you know.
I suddenly understand why suburbanites hate cities: they see the shitty, car-dependent sprawl around them and assume that an urban lifestyle must be like that, but “more,” when in reality it’s entirely different.
This looks more like suburbs to me than any city I’ve been to.
Yep, exactly. Actually-dense urban areas don’t need huge signs designed to be viewed from hundreds of feet away inside a moving car.
Hey, German here. Turns out, you can have all of that. You just need good urban planning.
These aren’t contradictory. If you build up instead of out, it’s easier to save green spaces and make sure that they’re accessible. If you keep cars off the road with good public transit, less green spaces need to get paved to make ugly ass parking lots, you get fewer shitty drive throughs, you get more walkable spaces and small businesses instead of big box marts, and everything is generally less polluted and shitty.
The problem comes when everyone wants their own little slice of private green space (that is, suburbia). You eventually end up in a single family home desert with a 5 sqft yard and some fucking dork with too much time on their hands coming along to measure your grass with a ruler and bitching at you about how your car doesn’t look as nice as your neighbors’, and how it’s ruining the character of the neighborhood. Meanwhile you look over Steven’s shoulder and it occurs to you again how every house looks exactly the same, everything is artificial and sanitized looking, like you live in a CGI scene from the late 90s. How long has it been since you’ve seen a bird? Kids playing outside? When was the last time you wanted to go outside? The last time your kids wanted to go out? You got them a bike, but they never bothered to learn to ride it, it’s quietly rusting away in a corner of the garage. You tried taking it yourself one time and got yelled at by someone in the neighborhood after they almost ran you over while driving recklessly (and maybe drunk). Actually, isn’t there some insect apocalypse happening right now? Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a ladybug or a butterfly? This all feels wrong. You tried to find the little dipper to show it to your kids a few weeks ago, but you couldn’t find it at all. You definitely remember seeing more stars as a kid. Maybe you should just refuse to cut the postage stamp lawn and let the tickets pile up, you’ll go into the woods and live off mushrooms, become a witch, and come back and terrorize your neighbors and grow trees in their living rooms. Where did that come from? Haha. Anyway, you don’t even know your other neighbors even though you’ve lived here for years. It’d be cool if there was some reason to run into them, like a shop or cafe down on the corner or something, but that doesn’t exist and you don’t want to bother anyone. You “oh, yeah, sorry” as Steven chides you to stop putting the garbage out the night before the garbage truck runs, and then bid him a nice day, even if you don’t mean it. No, Steven, I can’t go to your church this weekend. I’m, uh, busy.
Easy. Live near the edge of the city, walk ten minutes, be in the forests and open fields around.
And a city full of fun and public transport at your doorstep.
American cities suck because capitalism sucks up culture and spits out profitable memes.
Advertising, by itself, has probably spelled our god damn doom. Letting anything be sponsored by a corporation has made enjoying the simple pleasures of life damn near impossible.
Tbh, a lot of the suck comes from zoning codes and car centric design. Here, watch this kickflip: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
The cool thing is that, unlike economic systems, zoning codes are actually pretty easy to change. Your city council is in charge of that, and consistent, specific, and deliberate political pressure can still produce results at the local level. Right now, the only people showing up are the NIMBYs. We need people like you who want better cities to show up and demand them.
